Finding Potatoes

Ate these beauties last week, flavored by our own rosemary.

Sarah Palin ... In My Dreams

Like most people I know, Kim and I (Martin writing) have felt some tumolt over the presidential campaign. Certainly no candidate has received as much attention recently as Sarah Palin. And although at times I'd like to NOT know the latest news, polls, and rumors about the major players--I'm supposed to be writing poetry with abandon this semester--I can't seem to ignore what's in front of my nose all the time.

None of this, however, explains why I keep dreaming about Ms. Palin. Once, previous to this week (at least two years ago, in fact), I had a dream about Missoula that I felt, upon waking, I should immediately set down as a poem. I did so, and the poem created itself as easily as the dream had.

But now, twice this week, I've had vivid dreams about Sarah Palin which I felt I should set down as poems. I have done so, as faithfully as I can, with the realization that dreams play like movies, and poetry is words and lines.

Sarah Palin = unlikely muse?

If you know what's going on here, please do tell.


Walking with Sarah Palin

I walked last night with Sarah Palin.
I wanted to ask her
whether I a liberal and she
could be friends
We were walking through neighborhoods
a city park
I remember a man snapped a picture
with a large bellows camera
and a big smoking flash
only I seemed to notice she walked
with her head down
We crossed the parking lot of a strip center
she said she liked
Portobello mushroom sandwiches
and she made one right there

We turned into another residential street
stopped at her house
a stone bungalow
Where do you live I asked
she said This is San Francisco
She threw her keys on a small table
as I waited on her porch
I was surprised by Sarah Palin she was
quietly lovely
We started again
how leafy the West can be
but I wanted to ask my question
can we
can a person like me and a person like you
comfort one another
She anticipated me
No politics she said No questions on politics
if we’re going to walk


(dreamt on 9/15/08)

---------------------------------------

Working with Sarah Palin

My new officemate is
Sarah Palin
She moves in
with two men as tall and broad
as billboards
There is no advance notice
I look up
from my work
to see my lamp replaced
with a different lamp
dangling with beads
The men
fan across the room
without once seeing me

Leave the desk alone
she tells them
sitting
She swivels in her
black bucket chair
as if testing it all out
yes perhaps she thinks
this will do this will do
nicely
She swivels to face me
We are knee to knee
and I am wearing
nothing
but a blue T shirt
which I tug as low as it can go
not low enough
Sarah Palin shows no alarm she
just smiles
Cold Pacific waves break
against our office windows

~

We’re at a restaurant
a booth for six
but she and I are the only
people I recognize
the rest laugh and pass food
like they’re in a Chili’s ad
It’s as if
Sarah Palin has never been
to Chili’s
she grabs at unpeeled garlic
stuffs raw onion
in her mouth
Somehow I’m her agent her image-maker
laughing with the others
as I frantically bat away her hands

~

Sarah Palin and I are in a large assembly
we don’t know each other we’ve
never met
and a seated crowd separates us
It’s like the crowning scene in
Scent of a Woman
all of us talking under our breath
expectant and
Sarah Palin this event is
in her honor

A man stands speaks sits another man
stands and
Sarah Palin is introduced
called to the stage
As she begins to get up
the spotlight falls
on a mocking caricature
already on stage a
grotesque political cartoon
The crowd erupts
the real Sarah Palin
unrecognized cycles through
seven shades of shame
and runs she runs out of there
I follow

~

We play a primitive baseball game
with the boys

~

Operatives from her own party
try to push her from a plane

~

O Sarah Palin what did you do
to deserve this


(dreamt 9/17/08)

Birthday Festivities

Petit cupcakes. . .I, as adopted aunt, indulge in ze frufru of pink icing and the yum-yum of seven-minute frosting and raspberries from our garden.



Thought I'd post a quick log on my adopted niece Cat's birthday. My friend Nancy Greenthumb did me the honor of letting me throw a turning-seven festival. The day was so hot that the backpack (and baby inside) became very sticky. . .but I got my baking done early. I covered the tables in white butcher paper so we could write notes to the birthday girl.

After cake, when we were opening presents, Hurricane Ike's winds finally got to us and blew mightily. Martin's newspapers and hay he had laid earlier on the garden beds scattered wildly all over our yard (and they are still there on this day).

Happy eighth year, my dear! Live it well!

Cat's kind, classy Aunt M.J.--always with a dry sense of humor and kind observation.
More adopted family. . .

Birthday Mama (this shot, from Martin's shindig, is too perfect not to include here, though it's out of place).
The Birthday Papa, (and brother),

And oldest brother, with dear Grandma in the background.

And Baby's awake! Again!

Anna Swir, Birthdays, Life

Martin read aloud to us from a book of Anna Swir's poems (translated from the Polish by Csezlaw Milosz and some other chap) last night as I did up the supper dishes. He swung Baby Beatrix from one arm and read her short, simple, stunning lines. A breeze came in through the kitchen window--was it Anna Swir's images, Milosz's adept translation, or the warm dishwater mingling with the autumn wind that sent chills through my rib cage?

Or was it the children? Was it Elspeth and Merry fretting over something or maybe the book of stamps I saw--all that money, ready to be plastered all over the walls, the table, Elspeth's dress--that made me interject in the middle of one haunting poem: WHO LEFT THESE HERE???

I'll just read this later, Martin said, putting away the book.

No, I was really enjoying them, I said. And this is life right now. Moments of beauty and great love punctuated by chaos. Sometimes I can't even weigh the preciousness, the heft, of one moment until much later, filled as we are with the constant interruptions of baby crying, Elspeth painting herself, or Merry who wants JUST ONE MORE CHAPTER.

Sounds a lot like poetry, anyway. Why stop speaking poetry when our life is one long poem, unwritten? Just raise your voice higher, darlin', read louder. Or stop at the end of that line, continue it later. I think Anna Swir would agree, even though she was an only child.

Well, the Birthdays part will have to wait until later.

Speaking of crying babies. . . .I am in demand.

Reading Anna Swir Aloud

The poem starts
a line about her father’s
crummy art studio
I pinch the book open
with my left thumb
and jog the baby
slung over my right arm
as I read
and there was no bread for tomorrow

The poem stops
the belly of our house upset
by a two-year-old
forking butter
the whole butter stick
into her mouth
the clang of dirty dishes
a badass jetting down the road
he would take up his pallet and start

the poem this poem
meant something to me I say
and our oldest is
telling then singing a story
about “Laura pioneer”
and Pa
and wheat fields
I give the baby a clean spoon
to fondle
his pallet and start

to sing
The poem stops
My wife raises her voice
inviting divine wrath and fire
to consume the children
for their headlong lack of respect
and trail of toys
Maybe now is not a good time to do this
I moan
but she’s not having it
Don’t you start

the poem start the poem
again but I am out of focus
Who turned the radio up
What is that grinding sound
in my leg
Will someone please take
the kettle off
The children are destroying each other
in a distant corner
Father I begin
from the top
sang all his life

--Martin Cockroft

Between This and That

Between trying to educate Merry, keep track of Elspeth, and love up the baby (not to mention hosting receptions and company; attending and keeping track of Martin's shindigs; rereading an amazing book--The Known World--and having hysterical fits about the coming election and Palin in particular), I've had little time to blog.

Did I mention the constant Putting Up for winter? The other night I had a dream I put the baby in a tupperware and marked it with masking tape and permanent marker: BABY. Only until the next morning did I remember that Beatrix was still in the freezer, and hoped she would thaw well.

And now, suddenly, just as I begin to write, I'm inundated by girls again. Well, there will come a time, I'm sure. Meanwhile the trick is to remember wild and unfettered gratitude for all the abundance of. . .girls.
I leave you with this. A snap of the girls in their sleeping caps (I love Elspea's especially. Stylish.)

A Few More Visions From Summer

Hot tonight! Whoowee! Martin and I sweat as we watched Detective Goring on Instantwatch Netflix. But tomorrow promises to be cooler.

We have more lovely red raspberries coming in (had a few with yogurt tonight)!

I'd thought I'd catch up a little on some summer pictures. . .

Here's our dear "Aunt" Nancy with B.


Ubiquitous zinnias. . .


One of our garden paths, in progress (ran out of mulch!)


Two sweet girls. . .


The two big girls on their camping trip with Daddy while B and I were in Seattle. . .Apparently, the lake was rather chilly.



Here's the "walled tent" that Merry made into home sweet home for a couple nights. . .Martin tells me Elspeth seemed to have thought that they had moved there for good (not worried, I suppose, that Mommy and B were not around, as long as she could spend 24/7 mucking about outside).


Our glorious front path, flooded with Russian Sage, Purple Hyssop, Sages, and Queen Anne's Lace.


Summer badminton games down our hill--and a picnic--for Labor Day weekend.


Merry and Co. finishing off popsicles on the porch swing. . .


Elspeth picking raspberries in the mellow evening. . .


Elspeth, headed up the front steps (see the new garden I put in on the right, for which I dug up more, more, MORE grass!)


Beatrix and Grandmama conversing in a most serious manner on the front porch (the butterfly bushes behind attract the most incredible butterflies!) Later that night Martin and Mom and the girls finished supper on the porch while they watched a tremendous thunderstorm.

And finally, a bouquet I couldn't help but share--indicative of the wild loveliness of this past summer.

Summer Produce

Summer: is it tapering? We have more unripe black raspberries, but our produce is definitely coming in, not at an incredible pace, but enough to give me plenty to work with for dinner. Here's what was waiting for us when we returned from the beach.

Here's what Martin did with it that first day, before I started sauteeing a lot of summer squash:

Ah, summer. I started school with the girls this week, but I've also had just enough time to start the GRAND FALL CLEAN-UP outside. And believe me, there's PLENTY to clean up. I'm tired of feeling of having no driveway. So I've started tackling one pile at a time: sand, mulch, stone (will stay), brick (will stay), wood (will be built into the remainder of the fence).

Children's Garden

The Entrance to the Children's Garden. . .Follow the terracotta feet!

I keep waiting to post pictures until the garden is really in full swing (it is now)--these were taken a few weeks ago, and now the cosmos is in bloom, the sunflowers are happy, and the peas and beans are crazy.

Martin, rockman, heaved this boulder for a bench in the children's garden. Our main goal was to make a garden where everything was edible or pickable, and there was much scope for the imagination.

(Here's an early one of Elspea demonstrating the amazing Moses phenomenon. Of course here our plantings had not really adjusted yet.)

Here's a view of the riverbed Martin designed and constructed--water sprinkles out of the rock onto the rock. The white sand fills the sandbox, also make out of rock.


Here's a better bird's eye view--the paths are mulched with playground mulch. The chicken wire is starting to cover with a red-flowered vine.


This is best effort, I think, in design so far. Martin spraypainted the lines in the grass and then started digging. I designed the plantings, which will fill out well over time--a mixture of perennials, shrubs, veggies, and annuals. Here's a before, bird's-eye (it's the mess of landscape fabric at left):

And here's an after, close-up:

Beatrix & Bouquet 3

Shasta daisy, coneflowers, russian sage, pink yarrow, dill, Beatrix

Produce

I've got sugar snap peas in August. It's true, and they're lovely. . .the tomatoes are holding back, though, due to our wet, cooler weather. Cucumbers, summer squash, cucumbers, peppers, cilantro--did I mention cucumbers?

And lots of zinnias and cosmos.

I've got a hot cup of tea and Beatrix is sleeping. Martin is at a meeting and the girls are watching our family beach video for the 100th time, getting themselves ready for beach vacation 2008 (starting in a few days!). Merry's yelling. Will Beatrix stay asleep? Ah, the drama!

I've got pictures, but they're on the camera. I've been reading lots of books--my favorite so far is A Thousand Splendid Suns, (though the very last part of this fantastic book set in Afghanistan was, in my opinion, the least well written of the sections and unnecessary.) The book set me thinking hard about my own life--mostly about how lucky I am.

Merry is stomping off because I did not jump to my feet and flurry about in response to her request. Ah, the drama.

Elspeth is crying is response to Merry. And now she is stomping up the stairs. Ah, the drama.

Whooo.

Growing Up

I suppose part of my growing up at the moment consists of realizing there is little or nothing I can do to fix things for people I love most. For my friend who is ill; for my friend who wants a different life; for my friend who lost a baby.

We women in my family are women of action, and my first response to disaster is to act quickly, patch things up, get down on my hands and knees and scrub floors until the spots are gone, spills have stopped, and everyone feels happy and things are as they were before. A sick child: I busy myself cleaning up vomit and bleaching the sinks and the door handles, confident that the child will become better; we'll spend most of our days without illness and the child, my child, will soon be helping themselves to butter and flooding the bathroom floor and leaving toys on the floor again.

But then there are the things that I just can't work through, the things that cannot be scrubbed clean or ironed out or simmered down.

As my ill friend told me, all we can do, when there is nothing else, is to pray. I don't know if there was a time when I thought God would fix things for me, but there is comfort in asking God all the same. I even feel presumptuous or silly asking for what I think is best, so instead I think the names of those I love for whom I cannot fix things, knowing that God, who hears my thoughts, also understands my longings. Deeply I feel that all will be well, all shall be well, all manner of things shall be well--but in the meantime, in the worry, and in the waiting, waiting, waiting--there comes a point when busy work does not heal, and all I can do is open my hands in some sort of lopsided, trembling trust.

Stuff Rules--NOT

Ever since I returned from Seattle and from my parent's giant PARE-DOWN, I've had little patience for what seems like a tottering mountain of stuff falling down around our ears. I constantly get rid of things--there's always a bag filling on the back porch bound for Cherry Door Charity or Hidden Treasures (how hidden are your treasures? I'm trying to learn how to see the treasures and the trash through all the familiarity). I've been through the house, slipping things away into bags and trash cans (before the girls see it and decide they truly want that precious toy they've played with once or twice and not more). I had the feeling that our children had so much that they had no idea what to do with it all. And it's true--the less they have, the better and more happily they play. There's space suddenly.

"I will not be overcome!" I declared to Martin the other day. "I have to free myself from the tyranny of STUFF!" Right on, Martin says, but it's hard to keep up the pace on your own. You have to help me, I finally told him. So he sat himself down and we began in the sunroom.

"What's that?" he'd say, and I would pull something off a shelf, some boxes or maybe that tarnished silver tray I thought was so much fun when I bought it. "What is that?" he'd say, and I'd mumble some excuse for its existence in our house. "Get rid of it," he'd continue, with barely a shrug. "Really? My silver tray?" Suddenly: what's the significance of this silver tray? Zero significance. Bing! Bing! Bing! On goes the light. "Okay," I'd agree happily as I took it to a gathering place on the dining room table.

Out it goes! The more I do this sort of thing, the easier it gets to do. In fact, it's intoxicating to let go of all this excess. There's a funny sort of barrier that I have to get through--it's the barrier of thinking I care about something, about feeling owned partially by that thing--and then declaring my freedom. My dominance over that stupid silver tray. Out it goes.

I had a bout of this sort of freedom in odd circumstances at my parent's house. They went off to church and I stayed home with the masses of pictures and artwork they owned, faced with a tiny condo and artwork from Africa (very graphic), Asia (intricate, whimsical), and endless what-nots from around the world. And this was after two sortings that had squeezed the juice out of their metaphorical suburban orange and into a little distilled town existence--zest--the essence of their life's possessions. It was a quandary, though, how to make what was left over all work together. I was trying but I was somewhat aware it was a losing battle, and sure enough my mother breezed in from church and pooh-poohed my efforts. Well, this made me (slightly sleep-deprived, no shower) RATHER grumpy, and so she laughed and suggested we all stop and have a glass of wine.

And this is where things went a little balmy, for me at least. The wine made my mother jolly and relaxed. The wine made me aggressive and impatient with personal kindness. Just go through the box of pictures, my mother said, and let's get the ones out that we don't want. Nuff said, mama, watch me fly through this box, throwing pictures here and thereI never did like this one, etc, out, out, out! It was liberating and it liberated us all (my mother was not offended--she cheered me on, though she did warn me not to throw quite so heedlessly) from another meaningless (maybe meaningful once but suddenly not so much anymore) box of STUFF.

This, and my experience with my own house, has set me wondering about the pitfalls of capitalism--if we've got this much and we're a young family who has generally moved once every year or two, how much junk must everyone on my block have? In my town? In this country, for heaven's sakes? How many mountains could we fill with endless, endless, endless stuff??? And why do I feel as if I really need it, as if I need two or three sets of dishes and a room full of toys for my children, when they are perfectly content with a piece of paper and a box of crayons?

I remember my mother giving away our curtains from our windows to a guest who expressed admiration. You like em? Well, take em? I remember feeling personally wounded and rather panicked that she gave away her curtains with such alacrity. But why? It's just a thing, after all, my mother would say. Break the china in the fireplace! They're just things after all!

When we moved every year, there was a perfect opportunity for an intense clear-out. But when we're beginning your third year in the same place--oh, beware. Martin and I took out our kitchen table the other day after I counted up our tables and realized we had an embarrasing lot of tables and that we could use our porch table in our kitchen (brain wave comes every so often to this brocolli-head). As we're hauling out this antique table to the curb, we start second-guessing ourselves. Wow, it's really built nicely. Look at the notched work. It resided in my great-aunt's house for a lifetime, and it's still kicking. Why's it so heavy? Because it's well made, Martin hisses at me as we lug it down our porch stairs and on to the side of the road. I think this is a mistake, he says at one point. But then we really look at it and decide objectively, it is ugly. We don't like it; we aren't about to refinish its bizzare greenish stain; and chances are very good that now it's out of our house, we won't miss it in the least.

Why, why, why, am I holding on so tenaciously to mismatched socks?

I'm doing better, but it's a challenge, I tell you. Simple living? I don't even understand, really, how we've amassed so much. It comes in so fecklessly, so innocently, and then it puts down its little insidious roots in our lives. Warning! Invasive!

I will free myself! I will be free of this bizarre dependence on meaningless inanimate objects!

Back from Seattle

Seattle.

It's GORGEOUS (just like my dear friend Kara who drove up from Missoula to join me there for a few days).

My parents live in a perfect little seaside town, Edmonds, three blocks from the Puget Sound and just around the corner from a fabulous Thai restaurant (among many other amazing eating establishments and endless coffee bars).

A five or ten minute stroll out Mom and Dad's front door takes you down to the coast, which is unlike other US coastal lines in that it is free from horrible, towering commercial establishments and instead sports walking paths, a swimming beach (complete with underwater paths that twist around a sunken ship), and beautiful sculptures thrown oh, anyhow, around the place. Here's a favorite:

On a Saturday morning, my parents can rub the sleep from their eyes, pop down to the corner pancake house, whip through the incredible farmer's market, snatching up some plump cherries and a huge bouquet of purple balloon flowers and brilliant orange poppies, and then, hungry for fish and chips, take the rather clean, rather sophisticated ferry

where you can watch dolphin fins rising out of the rolling water or try to make sense out of the unbelievable size of

Mount Rainier in the distance on one hand or the Cascades rising like imperial sisters on the other.
Or you can just enjoy the wind in your hair.


My main porpoise (ha!) in Seattle (besides drooling enviously all over the bugless, diseaseless flowers--unbelievable roses, lavender--on every corner) was to settle my parents' little condominium. It's not the first house I've decorated for them, and I was lucky enough to get this one--a challenging downsize from their large Baltimore suburban house. (Here's a before:)

My parents wanted something a little more sophisticated than their last house and so we opted for a blue/black/white scheme, appropriate to their proximity to the beach (without being "beachy--" ug).

We put together endless flatpacked furniture, installed endless curtain rods, opted for endless smart storage.
We even tucked my father's office into a (now doorless) closet.

And now they are ready to party.

I arrived back east to sweet, fresh-faced girls and a champion Daddy who had taken said girls camping in my absence. The garden exploded in my absence (in a industrious way), and I am happy to be home. Seattle leaves me with a want for more sophistication, a longing for Thai food, my parents, and the ability to walk everywhere, but with a sense that I am in the right place, too, among the warm green hills of Pennsylvania and my own community.